WHEN OUR DRIVER puts his Bolero pick-up truck into four-wheel drive, we know he is getting serious. Ahead of us is a narrow gorge where the dirt track has decided to merge with the river. Rocks and gravel slip down the towering red, ochre and silver cliffs on either side, assisted by a howling wind.
The Bolero plods ahead on the riverbed until it cannot anymore. We have to walk the rest of the way. A rockslide reveals the earth’s guts: layers and layers of black slate that flake like perfect pastry, compressed by millions of years of geological forces and then thrust up from the Tethys Sea when the Indian tectonic plate crashed into the Eurasian one.
In the distance, where the river bends, we see a few houses. This is the village of Samdzong, in Mustang, a trans-Himalayan region in Nepal. We had driven an hour and a half east from Lo Manthang, the old capital of the Mustang kingdom, across an otherworldly landscape of towering ridges and deep gorges.
Samdzong is empty. Its residents have moved out of the river valley to a new settlement closer to Lo Manthang, next to a stream. The village has run out of water for its crops; its fields lie barren, its rammed-earth homes silent. This is the future of Mustang: it doesn’t snow where it should, and rains cats and dogs where it shouldn’t. Climate change is an everyday reality here, with precipitation patterns changing across an arid region.